I lost my way in August and traded horribly. I traded on 19 of the 21 sessions in August and was red on 12 of those days hitting my max daily loss stop on 6 of those!
In total, I took around 53 trades and had an accuracy of just 28.3%! Although this in and of itself is not such a bad thing; my win/loss ratio was not sufficient to overcome this as my average losing trade was around -$35.99 while my average winner was only around $74.36 or just under 2:1.
Consequently, I ended up with a gross loss of -$252.14; -$382.98 after commissions and fees and a total loss of -$507.98 after accounting for platform fees.
I failed to adapt to the drop off in volume and volatility. Several of my losing trades were solidly green before stopping me out due to not taking partials and being greedy; trying to hold out for big winners. When instead I should have been happy to take what ever little the market gave me; singles and doubles with the occasional home run in between.
So my small account, which started at $2960 on June 24th stood at $1,360.81 at the end of August 31st. July and June were also red months for me to tune of -$300.60 and -$790.62 (both of which include commissions and platform fees of $125).
To be honest, I thought long and hard about calling it quits at the end of August but then I reflected firstly on a week in March in which I'd "successfully" completed a TradeNet 5-day demo challenge which they deemed me to have been disqualified due to taking 1 but not 3 or more trades on the first day of the challenge a day during which the indexes had been halted down at the open and their platform was not even working properly...LOL!
Nevertheless, the gist of the challenge was to make at least $1000 in net profits over a 5 day period with a starting balance of $10,000 in buying power while not losing more than $100/day and not dropping below $9,700 at any point during the 5-day period. I made the $1,000 in profits and while the market conditions were different than they are now; this gave me the confidence that I could make money day trading.
I was a bit dejected after they determined I'd been unsuccessful but picked myself up in May and started paper trading with TC2000. During this month I made a total of 69 trades with 43.5% accuracy and $91.14 average winner to -$42.63 average loser or around 2.14 win to loss ratio. Overall I made a hypothetical gross profit of $1,071.82 with $15,000 in simulated buying power and around $150 max daily loss. I could remember not even trading that great and making a lot of mistakes but still ending up profitable at the end of the month. So this gave me even more confidence that I could day trade profitably and so I decided to go back to live trading with a $3,000 account at the start of June.
Somewhere along the way, I shifted away from my process which I had used to "successfully' complete the challenge and then to make over $1,000 in paper profits in May. Consequently, I lost money as alluded above.
This week, however, after reflecting on the above, I decided to go back to my "old style" and for the first time since going back to live trading this year, I've been green for 5 consecutive trades! I know it's still too early to "celebrate" but at least its a start and move in the right direction. My aim is to continue plugging away and claw my account back over the $3,000 mark slowly but surely and then hopefully fulfill my dream of paying myself from day trading profits for the first in my life before the end of 2020!
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